Critical Essay by William O. Scott

In the essay below, Scott considers liar paradox constructions in Timon's curses on mankind and himself.

In his essay “how to do things with Austin and Searle”—reprinted with a qualifying comment in Is There a Text in This Class?—Stanley Fish employs speech-act theory to describe the behavior of Coriolanus. Seeking the people's votes for the consulship, Coriolanus refuses to conform to accepted codes of speech and therefore of social conduct, and retorts to his banishers, “I banish you!”1 Fish says that Coriolanus both evokes expectations of conventional behavior and frustrates them here, undoing what purport to be his own verbal gestures. To Fish, Coriolanus is a special case...